


How to Make Amends and Friends

by notoneforreality



Series: QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [6]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 007 Fest, 007 Fest 2020, Awesome Eve Moneypenny, BAMF Eve Moneypenny, Eve Moneypenny is a Good Friend, Gen, HBIC Eve Moneypenny, Moneypenny runs the place, Prompt Fill, Team Q Branch, friends - Freeform, the gang's all here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24930451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notoneforreality/pseuds/notoneforreality
Summary: Eve is taken from the field and sat behind a desk for the crime of killing a man who rose from the dead anyway.By that time, however, she's already made herself quite at home.
Relationships: Eve Moneypenny & Bill Tanner, Eve Moneypenny & Q, James Bond & Eve Moneypenny, M | Gareth Mallory & Eve Moneypenny
Series: QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1795726
Comments: 9
Kudos: 51





	How to Make Amends and Friends

**Author's Note:**

> Written for--  
> 6th July: Moneypenny Monday  
> Trope prompt table: Moneypenny friendship

She picks him up in the middle of a high speed chase, then she kills him.

He comes back, cracks some jokes about cracked ribs, and promptly runs off again. 

Eve is bemused by the whole thing. Despite the fact that her plans of being a Double-oh drowned with Agent Bond, she finds herself not unhappy with the outcome. 

When she goes to Macau in Q’s place, Bond hands her a cut-throat razor, and Eve feels like Peter from the old Enid Blyton Adventure series, taming the bear.

“Are you putting your life in my hands again?”

Bond’s smile is slow, but it’s a solid thing. 

(He fiddles with her blouse, but he stops when she tells him off, hands raised in apology.)

They deal with Silva, with Skyfall, with Sciarra, with Spectre. Bond goes off with Miss Swann, and returns a week later by breaking into Eve’s flat. 

She comes home and crosses her arms and he does a bad job of making innocent eyes at her, but she won’t accept an apology until he takes her out for an obscenely expensive dinner and apologises to Q. 

* * *

She meets him in the war tunnels, after the explosion, after his promotion.

He sends Eve after Bond, the first time, then goes himself the second, and returns with news of Spectre and Miss Swann. She watches him frantically juggling both Bond’s problems and the issue with Nine Eyes, and suggests to the minions that he might want tea every so often.

When that doesn’t work, she goes and drags him out to lunch herself. They eat at an italian restaurant across the river, usually, and Q always orders the meatballs while she works her way through the entire menu.

Q looks at her over his glass of lemonade and Eve feels like Watson pulling her own Holmes out of his head, looking after her own genius.

“Are you using me as an alarm clock again?”

Q’s eyes crinkle, soft and sweet.

(He tells her all about italian food, and she doesn’t tell him to stop because he’s clearly used to being cut off.)

They deal with Bond’s nonsense, with Tanner’s requests, with M’s orders. Q spends half his life sequestered in the Q-Branch dungeons, and the other half dragged out into society and sunlight by Eve.

She keeps an eye on him as Bond turns into a housecat, dragging presents back from each of his missions, and keeps taking Q out for lunch and dinner, happy to spend time with and look after a friend.

* * *

She’s sent to him to be reprimanded and ends up his most trusted employee.

He releases her from her punishment and she comes back like a bird, to sit guard outside his office.

Eve finds herself very quickly in charge of far more far higher clearance data than she ever had as an agent, and finds that she likes being stuck behind a desk. She also finds herself liking the stuff management types that agents survey with equal levels of suspicion and disdain.

When she turns up at the office party, Mallory loops an arm through hers and Eve feels like Jo from Little Women at a dance with Laurie.

“Have you invited me to keep you entertained?”

Mallory’s eyebrow raises but the corner of his lips twitch.

(They have a wonderful platonic evening together, surviving the party with the coworkers and then going back to Mallory’s place to get properly drunk.)

They deal with MI6, with MI5, with all the people under and around their little pair of offices. Mallory orders everyone around except Eve, who rolls her eyes and says no and then does what he really wants before he can complain.

She makes her office an office proper, as opposed to a waiting room ahead of the headmaster’s office, and cements her position as assistant as opposed to secretary, safe in the knowledge that Mallory, at least, appreciates how much work she does.

* * *

She bumps into him in the management offices and decides that he’ll do for a first friend in admin.

Tanner helps Eve settle in to her new position at a desk and they team up to conspire with and without M, become a team that gets things done.

Together, they corral Bond, a full-time job in itself, and keep an eye on the Double-oh program, as well as on the rest of the organisation, the two of them juggling Britain’s international security when M’s to busy with bureaucracy.

Tanner tells her all the secrets of MI6 that she hasn’t already worked out for herself, and she feels like Artemis Fowl, unlocking all the wonders of a whole new world.

“Should you be trusting me with all of this?”

Tanner grins, sharp and bright.

(She shares secrets with him, too, and delights in discovering that he doesn’t quite know everything that goes on in the Cross.)

They deal with M, with Q, with Bond, with the world inside Vauxhall Cross. Tanner and she make friendly competitions of keeping the whole place running, and argue over who wins each round.

She makes herself an anchor, a focal point for the man who’s supposed to know everyone and everything, and becomes very good at sneaking his duties from under him, stealing jobs for herself before he can burn himself out.

* * *

Eve doesn’t kill a man and is taken out of the field for it. She carves herself into the heart of MI6 instead, a spider at the centre of a web, and sits, content, with half the fate of the country in her hands and a handful of friends in her heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Keep notes:  
> \--Eve reads books guys. Like a lot  
> \--in which I make increasingly obscure references sorry about that  
> \--I love how a good portion of the fandom has looked at the ending of spectre (if not the whole thing) and been like 'nah thanks'  
> \--aka the first time I set out to write a fic less than 1k and actually succeeded in keeping it that way


End file.
